Your Retention job may not have permissions to the destination storage device if that storage device is a network share/NAS, which requires permissions to access the share and is not wide open to everyone, in order to be able to access that share and delete files from it. Retention jobs do NOT have a way to specify Network Permissions like a Backup Job can. Retention jobs have no way of linking to your Network Device (network storage device) that you may have added to NovaBACKUP in the "Device" tab as a "Network Device". You may notice if you go to create/modify a Retention job, there is no Network Permissions area or a way to select one of your existing Network Devices. Because of this for network devices that DO require permissions to have delete (Write) access to your storage device it means that you will have to edit your Retention job and specify the Network Permissions manually, otherwise when Retention job runs it will fail to delete the files that it needs to.

Here are the instructions to do this:

1. First of all you will have to create a Network Device for your network share, NAS or Windows Server share. NOTE: If you already have created your Network Device for this network share AS WELL AS utilizing that Network Device that you added in NovaBACKUP to create your Image Backup job with, for the storage device option, then this step is not required as it means you A. already have created your Network Device in NovaBACKUP's Device tab for the network storage device, and entered in the appropriate admin permissions for that network device that you added, and B. When you created your Image Backup Schedule job you specified that particular Network Device for the "Backup Destination" selection field.Here are the instructions for that: Create a Network Share/NAS Device for NovaBACKUP.

2. After you have your Network Device added to NovaBACKUP, verified by clicking the "Device" tab and looking for the named Network Device that you added, you will create your "Image Backup Schedule" job to utilize that Network Device as the "Backup Destination" selection field. Otherwise the network permissions for that network device (NAS/Share) will NOT pass through to the Image Backup job.

In the "DR" folder you will find your Image Backup/DR job(s), the job files will be files with .nbk file extensions (if you have the "Show file extensions" option turned on in Windows Explorer you will see that). These are text files. You can edit these text files with notepad or other such text file editor. Go ahead and open the Image Backup job which you are using along with the Retention job that is having an issue deleting files. From the Image Backup job .nbk file you will be copy the [device] section which contains the correct Network Device parameters/network permissions for your network device. You will be copying that entire [device] section of text to overwrite the [device] section of text that is in your Retention job which is meant to be the Retention job for your Image Backup Schedule job. These settings are necessary to set the appropriate network permissions in that retention job so that it can have admin rights / delete / read + write access to your Network Device / NAS / Share. Example below:

1. Open the Image Backup Schedule job .nbk file in notepad, you will see a [device] section, select all of the text from that section and do a right-click "Copy". This will copy all of the text contained in the [device] section to allow you to paste it in to the matching Retention job in the next step.

Example text to overwrite (you will overwrite the entire [device] section of text:

[device]

SessionLogicalId=0

SessionName=Server01 Image to QNAP NAS - Retention

SessionId=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

MediaLogicalId=0

MediaExtension=

MediaName=My Media

MediaId=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

DevicePassword=6ffe28c4d2929d5c

DeviceUsername=

DeviceDomain=

DeviceUnit=

DeviceName=

DeviceId=0000000000000000000000000000000000000000

DeviceClassId=

Once you paste over the entire contents of the [device] section, you will Save the file in notepad. You have now overwritten the [device] section altogether to copy the section of text from the Image Backup Schedule job to the matching Retention job. Doing this will have set the necessary Network Permissions (Network Device Permissions) to the Retention job so that it can now delete files on your target network device which was used by your matching Image Backup Scheduled job.

You can run your Retention job manually now by right-clicking on that Retention job (that you edited above) and then click "Run Now..." to start it manually. Look to see if the files now delete on your Network Device / Network storage location where your Image Backups exist.